Keep high school football, but keep it safe

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Published: Monday, October 29, 2012 at 03:07 PM.

Hopefully, though, we can find ways to keep kids equipped with the most up-to-date gear to better ensure safety at play. Wouldn’t hurt for coaches to emphasize that cheap shots and blows to the head have no place in the game.

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy several more years of high school football and wish all Alamance County teams the best in the playoffs that start on Friday.

High school football season grows a little more exciting this week as a select few teams head into the playoffs for the annual sudden-death tournament. A season that began in the heat of August has ended for most teams but one or two from around these parts annually play into December before passionate crowds of students, parents, alumni and, well, fans.

Hey, we like our football here.

Enjoy the games as much as you can. There’s a dark cloud forming over the sport in the Northeast, and it has nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy.

The now well-publicized rumblings began last week during a school board meeting in Dover, N.H. Ironically, the subject broached by school board member Paul Butler wasn’t even on the agenda. A local reporter was present, however, and The New York Times published a lengthy story about Butler’s comments.

Butler, a retired physician, suggested the time has come to ban high school football. He cited the potential for concussions as being too great of a risk. Concussions on developing brains, he said, can have a long-lasting impact, including the possibility of brain damage, depression and dementia.

“I suspect it’s going to take a long time,” Butler said. “It took a long time for people to wear bicycle helmets. It took a long time for people to stop smoking.”

Butler went on to say that if the school board didn’t stop the game, lawyers one day would.

A familiar refrain.

His comments made their way to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, where the outspoken icon of conservatives called it part of a liberal agenda that is creating a society afraid to take risks. (We’ve paraphrased Rush to create a more wholesome image of what he actually said.)

The Dover school board stated publicly that banning football wasn’t on its agenda at this time.

Note the “at this time,” reference.

While we don’t particularly agree with what the good ex-doctor has to say, he’s not without a point. We live in an age where we are putting more focus on such things as civility, nurture and nutrition, yet charge admission Friday nights to watch our young people play a sport in the belly of an arena where a point of emphasis is to knock the bejeebers out of their opponents if they possibly can. And even the professional football ranks are working to make the games we watch on Sunday afternoon safer for those who play. Previous generations of NFL players are now succumbing to maladies perhaps caused by long undetected injuries related to vicious hits or lax equipment standards.

But it’s also instructive to remember the positive lessons football offers: The value of hard work, melding into a team, staying physically fit and overcoming adversity provide a valuable education. And there is something to be said for anything that brings communities together in masses.

It’s instructive and a tad worrisome that Butler would make a comparison to the long national battle with smoking. That tells us that this is just the opening salvo in what will probably evolve into some kind of national movement. Probably one day become an issue in a presidential campaign.

Hopefully, though, we can find ways to keep kids equipped with the most up-to-date gear to better ensure safety at play. Wouldn’t hurt for coaches to emphasize that cheap shots and blows to the head have no place in the game.

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy several more years of high school football and wish all Alamance County teams the best in the playoffs that start on Friday.